Rivet Logic Blogs

Category: Social Business

While most employers try to create a positive work environment for their employees, it’s hard to keep constant track of employee satisfaction levels, especially for large enterprises with thousands of employees. What most organizations don’t realize is just how great of a financial impact employee happiness can have on the organization.

Do the terms “absenteeism” and “presenteeism” ring a bell? According to a recent infographic created by digital agency Gravitate, lost work days caused by absenteeism — a habitual pattern of absence from work — related to stress cost approximately $30 billion a year, and even worse, lost productivity resulting from presenteeism — when a worker is physically present but lacks productivity — costs the U.S. approximately $200 billion annually! Those are some astounding numbers and should make any organization re-evaluate their workplace environment.

Not every organization can afford a Google-like playground of a work environment, where the abundance of employee perks make up for any extra added stress in the work place. So what can the rest of the organizations do? An effective way to increase employee satisfaction is through employee engagement, facilitated by collaborative internal communities that connect like-minded colleagues within the organization. Bringing an organization together has positive effects on the company culture, resulting in increased employee satisfaction and loyalty.

In a recent white paper, “How Social Intranets Enable Smarter Enterprise Collaboration“, we discuss the increasing need for enterprise collaboration in today’s workplace, along with how organizational benefits can be achieved through effective collaboration, and how a social intranet addresses these business needs.

Leveraging social tools that help connect people in creative ways, a social intranet offers a unified solution for addressing a number of corporate objectives — corporate branding and messaging, application aggregation, enterprise collaboration, social networking, document management, and more — while yielding a variety of organizational benefits, including employee engagement and satisfaction.

The term “Social Business” has been generating a lot of buzz lately, and many enterprises have set the gears in motion to achieve this. However, just like many other IT initiatives, it’s important to first understand what a social business really means, the drivers behind it, how your organization can stand to benefit, and the strategies behind a successful implementation.

KMWorld‘s June Best Practices White Paper focuses on the topic of Social Business Solutions, with a collection of articles around successful ways of achieving a social business. Rivet Logic participated in this white paper with an article on open and agile social business solutions, and discusses topics including business drivers, what it means to be a social business, social business value creation, and how to open source can help achieve the goal.